


A Woman Is Running

by Scribe



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 12:34:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1347640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Anna's life in Bolivia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Woman Is Running

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: This story contains torture and rape. Neither are very graphic, but neither are they incidental.
> 
> The idea for this fic came from a conversation with Petra in 2010 and it's been simmering quietly in the back of my mind since then. It's set in an alternate universe where Evo Morales was killed in a military coup shortly after he took office, and it attempts to be a more realistic take on the Los Perditos/Bolivian rebellion storyline.
> 
> Many of the incidents in this story are taken from first-person accounts of torture and imprisonment during the coups of Hugo Banzer and Luis García Meza. It is my intent to be respectful of these narratives and the spirit in which they were shared: that of raising awareness and opening discussion.
> 
> Thanks to Seascribe for betaing.

On the first leg of the flight Anna reads, flipping back and forth between a newly purchased guidebook and a binder of carefully photocopied academia, chapters from the library's small selection on Bolivian history and politics and culture. She learns about coca production and the Cochabamba water revolt and this hotel made entirely out of salt that's apparently really worth seeing even though it's a long jeep ride to get there. On the second leg she listens to Rosetta Stone- Spanish (Latin America). There's no one sitting next to her but there are two women across the aisle, so she just mouths the words to herself. _Un hombre come. Una mujer corre._

Luís is waiting for her at the Cochabamba airport, after a customs screening where they barely glance at her suitcase and the tourist visa she went to so much trouble to get. He calls her _Ana_ with the soft A sound and hugs her hello. She hugs back, trying not to let on how scared she was that he wouldn't come and she'd be stuck here without a phone number or an address or enough Spanish to say more than _the dog, the salad, a man is eating, a woman is running_.

Luís's car is small and old and green and he drives like a maniac. After a few minutes of clinging surreptitiously to her seat Anna realizes that, in fact, everyone drives like a maniac. There don't seem to be any kind of street signs or even lines on the road; occasionally they hit a stoplight, which Luís barrels up to before slamming on the breaks two inches from the next car. Anna can hardly believe they get to...wherever they're going...in one piece.

Where they're going turns out to be Luís's house. Well, she's reasonably sure that's what it is. Their ability to make small talk is severely limited by the language barrier, so they mostly sit quietly on the sofa. He offers her a drink- she knows that one from Rosetta Stone on the plane, _una mujer bebe_ \- and she takes soda, even though she doesn't really like it, because she can't face telling him that she can't drink his water or tea. The clock in the hall ticks steadily. After they exhaust everything they can say with the help of charades and Anna's Spanish-English dictionary, Luís gets out his guitar and plays a song, two, three. She smiles and nods and wonders what on earth she's doing here.

It's an incredible relief when the time apparently comes for them to leave. They drive again, a short trip that's half on jouncing, unpaved roads, and pull up outside the gate of a small house. Luís speaks to someone on the phone and a minute later a young woman unlocks it. She's small, long hair dyed golden brown, and looks about the age to be a recent graduate, though maybe people to go university at a different age here. Luís kisses her on the cheek and they exchange a few words.

"I'm Gloria," she says, turning to Anna. "You'll be staying here with me for a while."

"Oh, you speak English, thank God," says Anna, and then claps a hand over her mouth. "Sorry. Not that you should be obligated to speak English or anything, obviously it's a Spanish-speaking country, you have a right to speak Spanish. I just wasn't sure how I'd be able to help if I couldn't communicate."

"It's all right," says Gloria, laughing. "I don't mind."

"Thank you," says Anna fervently. Luís gives them the polite smile of someone listening to a conversation they don't understand. She's pretty sure she'll have the chance to perfect that one herself, no matter how well Gloria speaks.

Luís insists on getting her suitcase out of the trunk, and then kisses them both on the cheek again. Apparently he isn't coming inside.

" _Hasta luego_ ," he says, leaning over the car.

"Thank you," she tells him. " _Adios_."

He shakes his head at her.

" _Hasta luego_ ," he says again, extra-clearly, so she shrugs and repeats it back to him.

"Why not _adios_?" She asks Gloria as she drags her suitcase across the little courtyard inside the gate.

" _Adios_ is for when you will not see the person again, or not for a long time. For everyday, say _hasta mañana_ , or _chao_ , or _bai_."

"Good to know," says Anna, filing that away. Maybe by the time she leaves she'll at least be able to carry on a simple conversation. That wouldn't be a bad goal.

Gloria shows her around the house, which is dim and cool after the sunlight beating down outside. It's small, would run the risk of feeling cramped if Gloria didn't keep it so tidy. There's a kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom, and the room where Anna will be staying, which looks like a converted office. A small tortoiseshell cat bolts off the bed when she rolls her suitcase in.

It turns out that Gloria's English is so good because she works for an orphanage, translating letters so that donors from the first world can hear from the kids they're supposedly sponsoring. That's just on the side, though; she's really a junior journalist of some kind, mostly doing what sounds like arts and culture reporting. She has an event to cover that evening, so she leaves Anna to settle in with strict instructions to help herself to whatever she likes.

" _Hasta mañana_ ," Anna tells her at the door, and Gloria laughs and says,

"Very good. Tomorrow we will go into town and I will show you everything, I promise. I'm sorry to leave."

"Don't worry about it, you have to work. I understand. I'm pretty tired, anyway, it'll be good to relax."

"Good. Sleep well," says Gloria, and shuts the door behind her. Anna locks it as instructed, and a moment later she hears Gloria letting herself out of the gate to the street.

It's the first moment she's had alone all day. All of a sudden she feels overwhelmed and exhausted, the foreignness of everything pressing in around her. It seems preposterous for her to be here. She can't even speak to the person running the revolution she's meant to be part of; she doesn't even really understand what they're trying to do, let alone how she could possibly help. She's stuck here in another country where she doesn't know anyone or anything, just on a whim, for some fantasy.

The tears come fast, taking her by surprise. She sits on the cold stone floor of the hallway and just sobs for a minute, unable to think of anything, no hope of getting herself under control. It's just stress, she thinks. It's just been a long day. It's going to be fine.

When she finally calms down the cat is sitting at the other end of the hallway, staring at her with wide eyes. She lets out a watery laugh, which startles it enough to send it running back to Gloria's room. Anna gets unsteadily to her feet. She feels wrung out, both from the travel and the crying, and she's sweaty and hungry and just generally a mess. It's a good thing no one else is home.

She can't really face navigating the kitchen, so she ends up eating a can of tuna for dinner, along with a granola bar she had left over from the flight. The sound of the can opener summons the cat, but she doesn't know if she's supposed to feed it, and when she takes a few steps toward it it runs away again.

There doesn't seem to be any recycling. She carefully rinses out the can and puts it in the trash, shaking the barrel a little so that it isn't so obviously on top in case that was the wrong thing to do. Then she takes a shower- a quick shower, because there seems to be a choice between heat and water pressure and she goes for pressure- and curls up in bed with Rosetta Stone for company.

The panicky feeling starts to creep in again in the dark. Remember why you're here, she thinks. You wanted to do something important in the world, something that would help real people, something concrete. Even if you only help a little that's still more than you were doing at home.

Rosetta Stone is on a weather section.

" _La lluvia_ ," she says. _Hoy hace viento. Hoy hace calor._ " She falls asleep working on her pronunciation of the letter V.

 

This is Anna's life in Boliva:

She takes the _micro_ into the city proper, jouncing and jostling in the crowds. She learns to call out _la próxima esquina!_ and elbow her way to the door. She buys a chunky little cell phone and learns how to purchase credit, follows Gloria's advice and only makes calls inside so no one tries to mug her for it. She walks with her arm woven protectively through the straps of her bag. She learns to call a cab anywhere in the city, makes friends with a couple of the drivers from the company Gloria trusts. She says _cuanto cuesta por Canada_ at the phone kiosks and _cuanto por el internet_ at the computer booths and knows when it's too expensive.

For Luís, she keeps records. She has pages and pages of names, people who have been disappeared, where they were and what they were doing and any information anyone can find. She has testimonies from first-person witnesses. She has maps of places where the government crackdown is strong, places where someone on the run might be safe. Sometimes she organizes donations for families whose breadwinner has been imprisoned, and sometimes she moves money for vague, secret purposes- nothing suspicious about a white tourist counting _bolivanos_ at the bank- but mostly she does publicity. Every day she goes to a different internet café and sends her records to governments and charities and officials and to everyone she knows, every single person in her address book.

Here is what is really happening:

Today three people have disappeared from the streets of Cochabamba as if they had never been.

They are targeting indigenous activists, everyone in the media, public figures with international ties.

Today there have been riots at a school in Sucre. Marshal law is declared. We don't know how many dead.

A curfew has been instituted in Cochabamba.

We believe they are keeping prisoners in the old capitol building. This is unconfirmed.

Here are the names of the people who have disappeared this week. Jose Guillen, musician. Gabriella Ortega, musician. Augustín Taborga, radio host.

Today the last members of Evo Morales's cabinet were publicly executed. Reporters from several major newspapers were asked to attend, as there would be a press release from the new government following the executions. The journalists have not returned.

Missing today: Claudio Bayá, Lourdes Marta, Alvaro Maldonado, Jairo Salazar, Juan Carlos Guzman.

Anna rarely writes home with personal news. Canada seems impossibly far away, almost another world, and following the week's report of disappeared people with the trivialities of her daily life feels awkward and disrespectful. Instead she walks around the city, buys souvenirs and groceries and snacks, or she goes home to sit in the sunny courtyard and practice her Spanish.

Sometimes Gloria invites her along to the plays and concerts she covers for her newspaper. Anna goes to the Cochabamba Symphony Orchestra, which is lovely, to a rock concert where she hides against the wall and tries not to get stepped on, to a play she can't understand which is interestingly surreal for about half an hour and then just tedious. Gloria invites her out with her friends, too, but Anna doesn't want to take advantage of her good nature, so mostly she stays home and tries to work her way into the cat's good graces. Occasionally she goes out to Casablanca, the _gringo_ bar with the weirdly good Italian food, and keeps her head down while white university students and backpackers with European accents try flirt with her. She can't decide if it's better or worse than the catcalls she gets on the streets.

There are rebel meetings sometimes, where Luís and five or six others are fixtures and a steady stream of visitors come and go. They do serious planning there, though Anna misses most of it, at best getting hurried summaries when someone remembers to translate. Gloria helps her collect notes from everyone for her spreadsheets.

Her favorite times are the nights after the meetings. The rebels sit around after dinner chewing coca leaves and toasting Evo's memory. Sometimes there's music, or sometimes _cacho_ , which is kind of like complicated yahtzee with carved leather cups made out of what Anna honestly thinks are bull testicles, unless she's translating wrong or one of the rebels is playing a joke on her. It's a gambling game and they won't let her play without paying up, so Anna, who has never placed a bet in her life, finds herself losing a few _bolivianos_ a week in the name of participation. After a few months she starts winning sometimes, too. She adds whatever she comes away with to the donations she organizes. There's a sense of camaraderie on those nights that she loves, a sense being a part of something important and real.

 

Then, one day, Gloria doesn't come home.

She had some evening event to cover- Anna can't remember exactly what it was- but in the morning she still hasn't returned. Her car is missing, and the bag she usually uses. Anna tries not to panic. Maybe she was drinking at the gig and couldn't drive home afterward, or maybe she ran into a friend or a boy she liked and spent the night. Maybe she came home but had to run out again for some reason. There are plenty of explanations. Anna's phone is out of minutes, so she might have missed Gloria calling to let her know.

When there's no word by the lunchtime they usually share, Anna's nearly nauseous with worry. She wants to call Luís, but that would mean going out to buy phone credit, and she can't quite make herself cross the threshold. What she can see of the street looks normal, but what if the city proper is in lockdown, or protest, or taken over by the military? The accounts from Sucre play on repeat in her head. In the end she decides that if there's still no word by tomorrow she'll go out and catch a cab to Luís's house, no matter what's happening.

She never gets to do it.

She's making a late dinner when the men come, four of them, armed. They have some kind of insignia, military or police, she can't tell. They're a strange mix between forceful and polite, allowing her to turn off the stove and put the butter away in the refrigerator before they herd her out the door, saying _venga, venga_ when it becomes immediately clear that she can't understand their more complicated instructions.

Her mind is oddly blank. She finds herself wondering how they got in the locked gate from the street. And then suddenly she's in the back of a truck, and the doors are slamming, and it's pitch dark and there are other bodies and they're all silent and she thinks, oh god, oh god, oh god.

They drive. They stop. The doors open on darkness and someone yanks her out, blindfolds her, makes her walk. Another vehicle. Another drive, another walk. Inside this time, up a set of stairs.

When they take the blindfold off she's standing in a long stone room in the midst of a huddle of other women, guns pointing at them from several sides. The guards give a command that she doesn't understand, but it's easy enough to follow along when the others begin to undress. _Rápido_ she understands, along with a gun lifted in threat. They strip quickly, silently. Hair ties and jewelry go too. One guard gathers their clothes and takes them out of the room. The others prod them to stand in a long line, feet apart, arms held out straight to either side.

They stay like that forever. Anna's shoulders protest, and then ache, and then burn until tears come to her eyes. Movement is punishable: a woman down the line gets belted across the knees and then the face with one of the guns when she sags. A guard yells at Anna when she turns her head at the sound. She doesn't understand his words but the meaning is clear enough. Look straight ahead. Don't move.

Time crawls. It's eerily silent in the room, except when the guards have brief conversations. The stone floor is freezing under her feet, the guards' hands on her shockingly hot when they inevitably come. She doesn't move, looks straight ahead. At some point she feels something brush her shoulder, ever-so-lightly: the hand of the woman next to her. Anna begins to lower her own arms, trying to breathe through the screaming in her shoulders, moving slowly, imperceptibly. A centimeter over an hour, maybe. Slowly, slowly, and then just when she thinks she can't possibly take it any more her fingers touch the shoulders of the women on either side of her. She curls them around, grips, hidden under the cover of long hair, taking just enough strain off her shoulders that she can breathe again.

Her legs cramp next. There's nothing she can do about that but try not to cry.

They stand, and stand, and stand. At one point the guards change and the new ones leer and laugh and touch too, though one of them always stands apart to watch for movement while the others are occupied. She wonders what the point of it all is. She wonders if it's morning yet.

Eventually she has no choice but to pee, burning hot down her naked legs. The guards notice immediately and come to taunt her, even more when they see that she's blushing. At least she isn't the first one to do it. She looks straight ahead, doesn't move, doesn't meet their eyes. She'd forgotten that she had a tampon in, but now the wet string is dangling against her thigh and she finds herself remembering the warnings on the box about toxic shock syndrome. It's a strange thing to worry about- she may not even be alive long enough for it to matter- but she can't get her mind off it. How until toxic shock sets in, anyway? What if she's never allowed to take it out?

The guards take care of that, eventually.

 

This is Anna's life in prison:

She lives in a tiny room with eleven other women. They're always naked; it's always cold. The guards give them just enough food and water to keep them alive. Sometimes there's an option to bribe them with sex, but the women have no real bargaining power, since the guards can rape them whenever they want. Anna prays that she doesn’t get pregnant.

The water isn't boiled, and it makes her and several of the other women sick. They designate a corner of the cell for the bouts of diarrhea. It never stops being humiliating, even among all the other horror.

The women whisper among themselves a little. Two of them speak some English, though not as much as Gloria. Anna learns that they're almost all journalists or broadcasters of some kind, most of them not even politically affiliated, just casualties of the ongoing sweep of the media. No one has news of Gloria or Luís or the other rebels, not even the three new women who are herded into the cell several days later.

Sometimes the guards come in with instructions, which Anna mostly follows by copying whatever the other women do. Sometimes they call a particular person by name and sometimes they just come in and point, escorting one prisoner or another away. Sometimes the women come back. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes there are gunshots, or a woman is thrown back into a cell bloodied and beaten. They give their food and water rations to those who are the most hurt, but one of them- Elena, a radio producer- dies anyway. It takes several days before the guards come in to get her body.

Anna realizes that they don't know anything about her actual involvement in the rebellion. She was just collateral from whoever decided to seize Gloria, probably, or else wires have gotten crossed somewhere, but none of the guards seem to know why she's in prison. They don't even bother to get someone who speaks English to interrogate her. For a while they seem to think she has something to do with the CIA, or maybe the US government; they half-drown her or put her on a table that looks like a mad scientist designed it and shock her, yelling incomprehensible questions. _Canadiense_ , she says, over and over again, until it loses all meaning. _Canadiense, canadiense_.

They get bored with torturing her quickly, but she still gets singled out for sex. Because she's white, she assumes. Exotic. Special.

Then one day the guard calls her- not by name, but she knows enough to respond to _gringa_ \- and leads her in a different direction than usual, down the stairs and into a new room. There is a pile of clothes on the floor. He gestures to them, and then does it again, impatiently.

" _Ropa_ ," he says, in the loud, overenunciated way that they sometimes speak to her. " _Póntela_."

 _Ropa_ had been a Rosetta Stone category, actually. She struggles into the clothes, clumsy with hunger and exhaustion. _Camisa, pantalones, calcetines, zapatos_. There's no bra or underwear, and the pants are too short for her. When she's done she stands still, looks down and to the side, waiting.

" _Anda_ ," says the guard, which is another one she knows, and guides her to walk with the muzzle of his gun. Down a hallway, another set of stairs. He stops and blindfolds her, then a door opens and suddenly she's outside for the first time since the day Gloria disappeared. Under the edge of the blindfold she can just see grass coming through cobblestones beneath her feet. She has no idea how long it's been since she saw the sun.

They put her in a car. She goes cold with panic as it pulls away, the familiar stop-start of Cochabamba driving. This is the end, she's sure of it. This is the day they take her away and she never goes back to the cell, and no one ever talks about what happened to her. No one ever knows. She tries to remember what was in the last email she sent to her parents, but it's blurred together with all the other days she spent writing dispatches. Something about rebellion in the mountains near La Paz, maybe. And a list of the people who had disappeared.

The car stops.

Someone takes her roughly by the arm and leads her inside again. They leave her standing with the blindfold still on for what feels like an hour. She has no idea if there's anyone else in the room with her. Don't move, look straight ahead, she thinks. She doesn't hear anyone. Maybe someone braver would use this as a chance to escape, but all she can think of is pulling off the blindfold to find a man with a gun waiting for her. She stands still.

After a while they move her again. This time the blindfold comes off and they push her into a chair in a small carpeted room, set up like an office. There's one guard, who stands by the door and watches her. She doesn't make eye contact.

There's no calendar in the room, but there is a clock. Several hours pass, the sun slanting through the windows as it sets. Eight o'clock, nine o'clock. Another man in uniform comes in and addresses her directly.

"What is your name?" he says, and it takes her a long moment to process the fact that he's speaking English.

"Anna Conroy," she says.

"Spell please," he says, and she does. He just watches her, doesn't write it down or anything.

"From Canada?"

"Yes."

"What address?"

"Um." She swallows, trying to make her dry throat work. The last time she had any water was yesterday, probably. "Fourteen Wyatt Street, New Burbage, Ontario. Canada."

"Spell."

She does.

"Why did you come to Bolivia?"

"For vacation," she whispers.

"You were staying with Gloria Suárez?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"She was a friend of a friend. It was cheaper than a hotel."

The questions go on and on, ranging wildly from topic to topic. What are her parents' names. What does she do for a living. Does she have any ties to the Canadian government, the US government, the Bolivian government. How long was she planning to stay in the country. How much money is there in her bank account. Has she ever visited anywhere else in Latin America. Her voice gives out into a coughing fit after about half an hour and the man just watches impassively until it's over.

The clock says eleven-thirty when the bizarre interrogation is finally over. There's more waiting, and then a new guard comes and takes her back outside. He speaks to her in a muddled mixture of English and Spanish, the first time anyone has tried to explain anything since this all began.

"Mistake," he keeps saying. "Mistake, mistake. You go back to Canada."

She's so exhausted that it takes a long time to sink in. The clothes, the strange interrogation, the way people are suddenly speaking to her. Someone must have tracked her down. Luís? No, that doesn't make any sense. One of the international organizations that she spent so long trying to mobilize, or maybe the Canadian government? She'd registered at the consulate when she first arrived, though that doesn't explain how they knew she was missing.

The guard directs her into the open back of a truck, bench seats occupied by several of his uniformed compatriots.

"We drive you," he promises, urging her to sit. She does, keeping her eyes on the floor. The men are talking amongst themselves in quiet, informal Spanish that she doesn't have a hope of following. Her new guard goes around to the front seat and the truck starts, pulls away, drives sedately down the dark road. Anna wonders where they're going. Is her mysterious savior waiting for her somewhere? Are they just going to take her to the airport and send her away? She doesn't recognize the streets they drive through, although that doesn't mean much. There's plenty of Cochabamba that she's never seen, or they could well be in another city. It looks just like Cochabamba, though, the streets and cramped shops and gated houses.

The realization sinks in slowly, like ice water settling deep in her bones.

She's watching the street.

They haven't blindfolded her.

If they were truly letting her go, they would make sure she couldn't lead anyone back to the prison, or to the building where she'd been interviewed. The only reason not to blindfold her is if they expect her to be dead before she ever gets a chance to tell anyone what she's seen. Someone somewhere must have raised enough of a fuss that they didn't want the liability of having her in prison; much easier to conveniently find her body on the streets somewhere, victim of a mugging gone wrong, something that could happen to any tourist. Nothing to do with politics or prisoners or military regimes.

It happens fast, her body reacting while her mind is still processing the thought. She sees a house with the gate open and she dives for it, adrenaline propelling her off the truck and into a desperate, stumbling run, before she's even aware that she's decided to move. Gunfire around her. It's dark, though, and the truck is still moving, and she reaches the house unharmed. Open, thank god. She bursts through the door and slams it shut behind her, fumbling to bolt it.

" _Qui est là_?"calls a voice, and then it continues in Spanish. Footsteps. A woman in a long coat appears from a room off the front hallway, looking alarmed. She says something else in Spanish, a question, though Anna doesn't catch a word of it. Her mind is slowly, slowly processing _qui est là_ , so far from any context where it makes sense.

" _Aidez-moi, s'il vous plaît_ ," she whispers, dragging the words up from long-ago French classes. Help me.

The woman's eyes widen and she reaches to flick on a light in the hallway.

" _Est-ce que vous allez bien_?" she asks.

"No," says Anna, shaking her head. " _Je ne vais pas bien_."

She presses her back against the door, feels the locks digging into her spine. There's no sound from outside, no truck, no gunshots.

"I'm not all right," she says again, and starts to cry.

 

It turns out that the woman works at the French consulate. She speaks English too, which is a relief; Anna's French is better than her Spanish, but it's still nowhere near fluent. Anna stays there for the two days it takes the Canadian consulate in La Paz to send someone for her. Everyone wants her to see a doctor, but she doesn't like the idea of leaving the house. She tells them that she'll be home soon, with doctors she trusts, and they let it be.

She's in the kitchen picking at a bowl of peanut soup when they come for her. She isn't really sure she wants to go. It's not that she thinks the soldiers they've sent from the consulate are going to turn her back over, exactly, but anything could happen between Cochabamba and La Paz. Stepping out the door means stepping out of safety, back to the streets where she has to guard her bag and hide her phone and keep her head down around the men with their uniforms and guns. She wants to show Denise the French woman and the Canadian men at the door the lists and lists of people who have disappeared into thin air, to make them understand how in Bolivia you can, between one second and the next, simply cease to be.

"I think there is someone here you will be happy to see," says Denise.

She's about to explain that she doesn't want to go to La Paz, even with a Canadian escort, when a familiar voice calls from the hallway,

"Anna? Are you there?"

" _Nahum_?"

She doesn't really believe it until he comes around the corner into the kitchen, but then he's right in front of her and she only just manages not to knock anything over getting out from behind the table and into his arms.

"What are you _doing_ here?" she asks when he finally lets her go. Denise has tactfully disappeared into another room.

"I was worried when I did not receive your emails for many days in a row," he says. "No one else received them either. I called the consulate in La Paz, but they did not listen to me, so I thought perhaps it would be best to talk to them in person. I arrived last week."

"Nahum, you can't just take a week off of work and fly to Bolivia. Where did you get the money?"

"Ah. From Richard Smith-Jones."

"What?"

"I told him many stories of what happened to my friends who were imprisoned in Nigeria, and also stories from your emails. I do not think he had been reading them thoroughly."

"No, I doubt it," says Anna, laughing. She can just imagine Nahum following Richard around, refusing to take hints that it wasn't a good time, keeping up an implacable narration of all the things that could be happening to her until Richard threw money at him just to make him go away.

"Thank you," she says.

"You are welcome, of course." Nahum looks her over and frowns. "They have been starving you," he adds.

Anna has the strangest urge to deny it, to make excuses for her captors like a houseguest defending a less than perfect host. She swallows down the words and gestures to her abandoned bowl of soup.

"I'm making up for it," she says instead.

"Well, I do not want to keep you from your meal," says Nahum.

"Oh, no, you're not. Please stay."

He does stay, accepting a bowl of his own and sitting down to keep her company while the men from the consulate go out to investigate Gloria's house. She asks them to check Luís's, too; she's called him twelve times in the last two days and gotten no response.

Nahum doesn't ask her any questions, just eats his soup and fills her in on all the news from home. New Burbage is doing _The Tempest_ and _Mame_ and a new Craig Lucas play that he likes. Her replacement is handling Richard well enough but feuding with Maria. Geoffrey spent a week on his couch last month when Ellen kicked him out again. The newest venture of the Theater Sans Argent is an after school drama program for kids, which is bringing in at least a little money. Nahum is working there part time- all Geoffrey can pay him for- directing the high schoolers in _All's Well That Ends Well_ , in addition to his usual job with New Burbage. The new program is the brainchild of someone called Cheryl who Anna thinks she'd like to meet.

It all seems impossibly removed from the small Cochabamba kitchen, from the crowded prison cell and the dim rooms where they took her to be tortured. Another world entirely.

Her Canadian escort comes back and reports that Gloria's house has been looted badly; Anna remembers the gate hanging open as they hustled her out. Luís's house seems intact but empty. They've brought her back a few of her possessions, little things with no value to whoever had ransacked the room: some clothes, a hairbrush, her battered Spanish-English dictionary. Some of the items are Gloria's. She puts them in the bag that Denise gave her anyway, since there doesn't seem much else to do with them.

She asks about the cat, but no one noticed it.

Going outside is still nerve-wracking, but it's better with Nahum there. She says goodbye to Denise and gets in the car and away they go, to the little plane for La Paz and then in a car to the consulate, where she stays overnight and answers what feels like ten million questions, and back to the airport and onto a bigger plane and then she and Nahum are in the air, headed for Florida, and it only takes a minute for the Andes below them to vanish into cloud.

 

This is Anna's life in Canada:

She works part-time at the Theater Sans Argent, shops her resume around and ends up with an evening job as the house manager for the drama department of one of the local universities. It's mostly organization, coordinating students who are working there two or five or ten hours a week, drawing up schedules, training volunteers. She likes it more than she would have expected. The kids are better than the New Burbage interns, maybe because they're actually getting paid, maybe because they're the type of people who care enough to get a degree in performing arts. It's easy to imagine them growing up into a new set of Geoffreys and Olivers and Marias.

She isn't pregnant, thank God.

She sees a therapist for a while, even though she doesn't like to talk about what happened to her. It hasn't left many obvious scars. She distrusts the military more than she used to, and she doesn't like being naked, but she didn't really like it much before, anyway. For the most part everything is the same. She deals with the petty problems of two theater companies and walks freely and has enough to eat, secure in her own country.

She doesn't send any more emails. She never finds out what happened to Gloria, or Luís, or any of the women who shared bread and water with her in prison, the ones with no foreign government to search them out. She hates herself for it, but even the guilt isn't enough to make her do anything, to step back outside her inconsequential little world where everything is easy and everyone comes home at night.

The new regime lasts six years before it, too, is toppled, another coup. Anna doesn't hear about it for several weeks. She's in the middle of the university's mainstage production, and it doesn't make the Canadian news.


End file.
